LG Display will pay a fixed license fee plus running royalties on its OLED products, and will also continue and buy phosphorescent materials from UDC.

LGD already uses UDC's materials in its OLED TV (it is UDC's second largest customer, and its share in UDC's revenue is growing quickly). UDC has said it is in no hurry to sign a long-term agreement as the current terms are actually better for the bottom line (in the current agreement the royalties are built into the material's sales).

But this announcement should be seen as positive for Universal Display investors. First of all, this evidently shows LG Display's commitment to OLED displays (both TV and flexible panels) - even though this is no surprise to anyone following LG's OLED TV program in the past months.

Universal Display has a similar agreement in place with Samsung Display - signed in 2011. The SDC agreement lasts till 2017, which got many investors worried about patent expiration in 2017. But this new agreement with LGD runs till 2022, which should relax those fears.

Finally, LGD would only have signed such a long-term agreement if it knew UDC's technology and IP is unavoidable. This means that LGD's lawyer did not think they could go around UDC's main patents - at least until 2022. Only a few days ago Sumitomo Chemical signed an OLED lighting license agreement with UDC, which was also a great validation for UDC's phosphorescent patent lock.

While there are going to be many bumps in the OLED market in the near-term, the future looks bright - both for OLED technology and Universal Display. I do not know if UDC's share price will indeed reach $715 in 2018 as I once joyfully wrote, but today's agreement is a step in the right direction.

Investors should next look to expanded OLED TV capacity at LG, new OLED display makers (including BOE, Tianma, Japan's JOLED), expanded capacity for flexible displays and tablet displays at SDC, Samsung's re-entry into the OLED TV market (probably won't happen before 2016) and of course Apple's (NASDAQ: AAPL) first OLED product (which will be the Apple Watch, in early 2015).

Disclosure: The author is long OLED.

The author wrote this article themselves, and it expresses their own opinions. The author is not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). The author has no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article

Apple's Watch display has been discussed following its launches, and according to my sources it uses a flexible OLED display. It's pretty much confirmed as far as I'm concerned, but of course we will have to wait for the official release.

Apple will not become a UDC customer - they will be using LG Display's OLEDs (same as Nokia, Motorola and even Samsung Electronics are not UDC's customers).

I follow that if Apple's watch (and/or other possible future Apple products) use OLEDs, Apple gets access to the materials and technology by sourcing the display modules from a supplier like LG Display, which is now properly licensed with Universal Display.

My impression has been that LG's focus has been on larger area OLED displays - such as for televisions. While Samsung Display has ramped up capacity for smaller area OLED displays, which we see proliferated across Samsung Electronics' Galaxy smart phone product lines.

Do you have any opinion around LG's OLED development in smaller area displays?

The LOI is intended as the first step in a joint commitment by SmartKem and the Chinese manufacturer of optoelectronic solutions, TFT-LCD and AMOLED displays, to fully commercialise OTFT production4 Oct 2017 | Editor

SmartKem has announced they have signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) with one of China’s leading OLED manufacturers. The partnership will enable the development and industrialisation of OTFT Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) leading to the development of OTFT based LCD and OLED display manufacture on plastic substrates.

The LOI is intended as the first step in a joint commitment by SmartKem and the Chinese manufacturer of optoelectronic solutions, TFT-LCD and AMOLED displays, to fully commercialise OTFT production.

According to Smartkem their OTFT platform consists of a series of solution coat TFT stack materials including its organic semiconductor that offers transistor performance, electrical stability and a drive capability for both LCD and OLED display formats.

SmartKem has recently completed the development of OTFT design rules and a process of record for the production of OTFT on an industrial grade Gen 2.5 production line in Asia.

"We are delighted to report this partnership which creates the opportunity to scale up, industrialise and drive wide scale adoption of OTFT technology for a new generation of low power, lightweight and unbreakable display-based products. We are leading the market in this technology space and excited about the potential for the mobile display market to move forward with a solution to a number of key consumer issues, namely broken displays and battery life."

"Our partner’s reputation as an innovator is second-to-none and aligns closely with our own ethos of value-driven technology advancement. Their customer network is unparalleled, with many household names, including Microsoft, Sony, Samsung, Ford and BMW, using their technology today."

"This partnership puts our technology into production at the heart of the largest hub of display manufacture in the world and shows willingness of leading players to devote significant resources towards the pursuit of OTFT adoption."

The opportunity that SmartKem’s technology platform and vision represents was reflected by a successful Series A funding round and continued financial commitment and backing from leading investors including BASF Venture Capital, Octopus Ventures, Finance Wales and Entrepreneurs Fund since 2014. The syndicate’s investment has enabled further development and market penetration of SmartKem’s record breaking truFLEX semiconductor platform, accelerating the technology towards full commercialisation.

SmartKem's accolades include a Printed Electronics Asia award for Best Advanced Material Development and 2015 Innovative Product of the Year for Wales. The company was a finalist in the prestigious R&D100 Awards in 2015.

If Samsung says we want to sign a short term deal, they cause fear in the market and blood on the street. UDC needs a longer deal lest people start talking about patent cliffs, and that's a big hammer that Samsung holds.

University of Michigan collaborates with UDC on many fronts. SR Forrest is a member/owner of both

In June 2016 UDC announced that it is going to acquire Adesis, Inc - a privately held contract research organization with 43 employees specializing in organic and organometallic synthetic R&D and commercialization to help advance and accelerate a number of UDC's product offerings

OVJP is a "mask-less deposition technology". UDC hopes that OVJP will enable a low cost, high performance, large area patterned manufacturing process platform. OVJP stands for Organic Vapor Jet Printing, and the basic idea is to use a gas-stream based process that resembles ink-jet printing but one that uses evaporation OLED materials which outperform soluble ones. In an OVJP process, the OLED materials are evaporated into a carrier gas that delivers them to a jet engine for direct printing of patterned OLED layers. OVJP is intended for large-area OLED displays and can be scaled up to 10-Gen substrates according to UDC

A new research study led by Max Shtein, professor of materials science and engineering, and Olga Shalev, a recent graduate who worked on the project while a doctoral student in the same department, showed that the pure printed medication can destroy cultured cancer cells in the lab as effectively as medication delivered by traditional means, which rely on chemical solvents to enable the cells to absorb the medication. Their study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

The technique was developed through a collaboration between the Michigan Engineering departments of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering, as well as the College of Pharmacy and the Department of Physics in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

The researchers adapted a technology from electronics manufacturing called organic vapour-jet printing.

One key advantage of the technique is that it can print a very fine crystalline structure over a large surface area. This helps printed medications dissolve more easily, opening the door to a variety of potential new drugs that today are shelved because they don't dissolve well when administered with conventional approaches, including pills and capsules.

The process begins by heating the active pharmaceutical ingredient—usually a powder—and evaporating it to combine it with a stream of heated, inert gas like nitrogen. The evaporated medication travels, along with the gas, through a nozzle pointed at a cooled surface. The medication then condenses, sticking to the cooled surface in a thin crystalline film. The formation of the film can be tightly controlled by fine-tuning the printing process. The process requires no solvents, no additives and no post-processing.

University of Michigan - Printed medicine shows promise

Figure: University of Michigan - Crystal structure of ibuprofen, printed onto a silicon film using organic vapour jet printing

The tight control over solubility may also be useful later in the drug testing process, when potential new drugs are applied to cultured cells in a lab. According to the researchers most compounds must be dissolved in a chemical solvent before they're applied to cells. The new technique could enable printed medications to dissolve easily in the water-based medium used to culture cells, without the need for a solvent.

While printing mass-market drugs is likely years away, the researchers believe that the drug characterisation and testing applications may come to fruition more quickly—internally in pharmaceutical companies.

The team is exploring additional applications for the technology and plans to collaborate with experts in pharmaceutical compound design and manufacturing, as well as those working on treatments. Eventually, they envision vapour jet printing being scaled to mass production, including roll-to-roll continuous manufacturing.

The research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the National Science Foundation, and the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

"A doctor or pharmacist can choose any number of medications, which the machine would combine into a single dose."

"The machine could be sitting in the back of the pharmacy or even in a clinic."

"Pharma companies have libraries of millions of compounds to evaluate, and one of the first tests is solubility"

"About half of new compounds fail this test and are ruled out. Organic vapor jet printing could make some of them more soluble, putting them back into the pipeline."

Max Shtein, Professor of materials science and engineering

"Organic vapor jet printing may be useful for a variety of drug delivery applications for the safe and effective delivery of therapeutic agents to target tissues and organs."

Geeta Mehta, The Dow Corning Assistant Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biomedical Engineering and a co-author on the paper

"When researchers use solvents to dissolve drugs during the testing process, they're applying those drugs in a way that's different from how they would be used in people, and that makes the results less useful."

"Organic vapor jet printing could make those tests much more predictive, not to mention simpler."

Anna Schwendeman, Assistant professor of pharmaceutical sciences at U-M and an author on the paper

"One of the major challenges facing pharmaceutical companies is speed to clinical testing in humans."

"This technology offers up a new approach to accelerate the evaluation of new medicines."

Gregory Amidon, Research professor in the U-M College of Pharmacy and an author on the paper

AbstractThere is growing need to develop efficient methods for early-stage drug discovery, continuous manufacturing of drug delivery vehicles, and ultra-precise dosing of high potency drugs. Here we demonstrate the use of solvent-free organic vapor jet printing to deposit nanostructured films of small molecular pharmaceutical ingredients, including caffeine, paracetamol, ibuprofen, tamoxifen, BAY 11-7082 and fluorescein, with accuracy on the scale of micrograms per square centimeter, onto glass, Tegaderm, Listerine tabs, and stainless steel microneedles. The printed films exhibit similar crystallographic order and chemistry as the original powders; controlled, order-of-magnitude enhancements of dissolution rate are observed relative to powder-form particles. In vitro treatment of breast and ovarian cancer cell cultures in aqueous media by tamoxifen and BAY 11-7082 films shows similar behavior to drugs pre-dissolved in dimethyl sulfoxide. The demonstrated precise printing of medicines as films, without the use of solvents, can accelerate drug screening and enable continuous manufacturing, while enhancing dosage accuracy.

It is not customary for companies to hold public negotiations or threaten other companies of leaking information about IP negotiations with the purpose of hurting stockholders. If Samsung does come out with such a statement I can see the UDC management walking off the negotiations and demanding that Samsung stop the OLED production when the current contract ends. Samsung, which, makes billions from OLED will have to risk (1) being sued by Apple for billions of dollars in losses. (2) sued by UDC the day after the contract ends, and having ALL its phones removed from Japan, US and the European markets. In fact, UDC might make more money in the lawsuits then from Samsung's royalties and material purchase.

Meanwhile, I recommend reading the WSJ today's article on washing machines. It turns out that LG and Samsung have been dumping washing machines in the US market. Each time they are found liable they move the manufacturing to another country so as to avoid the US courts' decisions. Trump, with all his craziness has created a mood in the US that will no longer tolerates the Koreans or Chinese shenanigans. If Samsung chooses to conduct a trade war against the US (and Apple) the US courts and the juries will slap them li never before. The Apple Samsung saga will look like child play. Namely, this would not be about a 5 or 6 design patents. The lawsuit(s) would be about manufacturing, design, chemical compounds across three continents.... in fact, the lawsuits might continue well beyond 5 to 10 years with Samsung being barred from the US markets while the Chinese, Japanese and LG play catch up. For Samsung, not signing a long rm contract will be going nuclear, and for what, a few hundred million dollars?

Like I said before I'll be disappointed if they don't get a big bump in money and a nice 5 year term.

While I would definitely take a five year contract, I would trade a little lower royalty rate for six years. That would take us until the end of 2023 so UDC wouldnt have both LGD and Samsung expiring at the exact same time. It would also help prove out their claims that their royalty stream will not expire with their core iridium and ligand patents.

UDC has signed Samsung to two contracts during their history. The first, signed in 2006, was characterized as a "sweetheart" deal. The second was called a "no downside" deal. I am hoping that UDC's negotiators do better this time around.

Last I checked Samsung has a major deal with Apple right now on IPhone X. If no deal is signed UDC is certainly in a position to withhold orders, thus hurting 2 major companies and a new launch. Who exactly has the leverage?

It is certainly worth speculating about the upcoming Samsung contract and exploring possible scenarios.

That said, I am of the opinion that a contract is all but signed. Samsung would never have committed so much capital into current manufacturing capacity with more coming online shortly thinking they might discard it all in a few years after the end of the this 5 year contract.

Apple would have never decided to go OLED without assurance, probably extremely costly to Samsung if not supplied, that a supply of Oled screens would be available to them which means UDC was certainly considered.

Sid has stated many times and as a lawyer he knows that litigation is expensive and time consuming. UDC has never been sued nor have they sued another company. From the beginning, UDC has negotiated with customers with the healthy attitude of a Win-Win for both parties.

I have stated that my guess is that Samsung and UDC have in place what could be considered a 5 year "extension" of the current contract. Sure, a few caveats, incentives will be considered but both companies are doing very well with OLED and neither party needs to rock the boat at this time.

I agree with all of what you said except the part about lawsuits. UDC as you have stated has never been on either side of a suit but they are now entering a whole new world where they will negotiating and renegotiating a boatload of new contracts. They also will no longer be under the radar as the industry explodes and the big boys see an opportunity to make money in their space. UDC alluded to this in their filings and stated they want to have a stash of cash in the event of future suits. I hope they don’t need it but, like them, I wouldn’t count on it.